Veiled Sentiments Research Articles

Beyond Honor and Shame: Performing Gender in the Mediterranean

Beyond Honor and Shame: Performing Gender in the Mediterranean Amanda Weidman George Washington University Tullia Magrini, ed., 2003. Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In Veiled Sentiments, her now classic ethnography of the Bedouin Awlad 'Ali, Lila Abu-Lughod shows how a culturally sanctioned poetic form can enable critique of and maneuver within a society which defines morality in terms of adherence to the principles of and modesty. Awlad 'Ali recite ghinnawas, a form of traditional oral poetry characterized by the creative use of formulaic phrases and a set of common themes and metaphors, in the course of conversations; these ghinnawas often present a state of mind that is strikingly different from those conveyed in mundane conversation and public discourse. In a society where honor is associated with independence, autonomy, and stoic acceptance of hardship, and modesty or with masking one's sexuality and romantic attachments, ghinnawas present a world of sentiment, of attachment and vulnerability. In effect, they provide the Awlad 'Ali-both men and women-with a second culturally constituted and sanctioned discourse for expressing interpersonal experiences, one in which they are able to express sentiments that would otherwise violate the codes of and modesty. Thus, when the wife of a man from an important family runs away, he speaks in mundane conversation about finding who is to blame for ruining her; her flight is viewed as an insult to his lineage. Yet in private, he recites several ghinnawas that convey his grief and pain at this loss, and his desire to see his wife again: Cooking with the liquid of tears at a funeral done for the beloved... Her bad deeds were wrongs that hurt yet I won't repay them, still dear the beloved... (1986: 189). Through its examination of this poetic genre, Veiled Sentiments presents a co-gent elaboration and critique of the most pervasive paradigm of Mediterranean anthropology, what is often referred to as the honor/shame Indeed, honor and have become so canonical in the study of Mediterranean societies that it is hard to escape them. In the same way that hierarchy and caste became, in the 1950s and 60s, the primary lens through which many scientists studied South Asia, and filial piety and social face came to be seen as the driving forces of traditional East Asian cultures, honor and became the anthropological buzzwords for a cultural syndrome that was thought to characterize Mediterranean societies. The foundational publication in this regard came from a group of anthropologists associated with the Oxford school of anthropology, led by John Peristiany and Julian Pitt-Rivers. Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (1966), edited by Peristiany, argued that there exists a sex-linked, binary opposition in which is associated with men and shame with (quoted in Magrini 2003: 12). Throughout the anthropological literature on Mediterranean societies, men were portrayed as obsessed by maintaining and upholding the family name at all costs, while women were represented as silent, passive, and marginal figures who were secluded in their houses, modestly covered head to toe in order to exorcise the potential sensuality of their bodies, and removed from any outside activity or role (Magrini 2003: 13). This stereotype spread from anthropology to the popular press, so that honor/shame became a way of explaining the history of Mediterranean societies in terms of a cultural essence, an intractable and problematic syndrome. If in anthropological literature this powerful mode of representation served to deny individuals (and especially women) any sense of agency, in the journalistic press, it was used effectively to deny the existence of legitimate politics in these societies, to label them as premodern. …

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Multiple discourses among the Bedouin: Fieldwork and the invention of the ethnographic text

Abu‐Lughod, Lila. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1986. vii + 317 pp. including appendix, notes, bibliography and index. No price. Ingham, Bruce. Bedouin of Northern Arabia: Traditions of the Al‐Dhafir. London: KPI Limited, 1986. vii +136 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 cloth.

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Iran Between Two Revolutions, By Ervand Abrahamian Mollā Sadrā Sh?rāz?: Le Livre des pénétrations métaphysiques (Kitāb al‐Mashāir). Translated from the Arabic, with an Introduction and Notes, by Henry Corbin Le livre du licite et de l'illicite (Kitāb al‐halāl wa‐l‐harām, Book XIV of Al‐Gazāl?'s Ihyā Ulūm ad‐D?n). Introduction, translation and notes by Régis Morelon Society, State, and Urbanism: Ibn Khaldun's Sociological Thought. By Fuad Baali Shari'at and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam. Edited by Katherine P. Ewing The Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Muhammad. By Gordon Darnell Newby Muslim Hausa Women in Nigeria: Tradition and Change. by Barbara J. Callaway Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society. By Hisham Sharabi The Islamic Impulse. Edited by Barbara Freyer Stowasser Christians and Muslims Together: An Exploration by Presbyterians. Edited by Byron L Ägypten unter Mubarak: Identität und nationales Interesse. by Gudrun Krämer Towards Understanding the Qur)ān. Vol. 1, Sura 1–3. English version of Sayyid Abul A(la Mawdudi's Tafhim al‐Qur(ān, translated and edited by Zafar Ishaq Ansari Middle East Contemporary Survey. Vol. IX. Edited by Itamar Rabinovich and Haim Shaked. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al‐(Arab?'s Metaphysics of Imagination. By William C. Chittick Colonising Egypt. By Timothy Mitchell Past‐Revolutionary Iran. Edited by Hooshang Amirahmadi and Manouchehr Parvin Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice. By M. E. Combs‐Schilling Islam: The Straight Path. By John L. Esposito Islam, Politics, and Social Movements. Edited by Edmund Burke, III, and Ira M. Lapidus Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. By Lila Abu‐Lughod

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, by Lila Abu-Lughod. 317 pages, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles1986. $37.50.

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, by Lila Abu-Lughod. 317 pages, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles1986. $37.50. - Volume 23 Issue 2

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Poetry and Culture: The "Bottom Line"

Lila Abu‐Lughod. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in. Bedouin Society. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1986. xix. 317 pp. $35.00 (cloth); $10.95 (paper).Stanley Diamond. Going West. Northampton: Hermes House Press. 1986. 80 pp. $5.50 (paper).

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

This updated edition is presented with a new Preface. Lila Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But her analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of a system of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the relationship between ideology and human experience.

: Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society . Lila Abu-Lughod.

: Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society . Lila Abu-Lughod.

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. LILA ABU‐LUGHOD

<i>Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society</i>. LILA ABU‐LUGHOD

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society